AMONG THE 52 photographs on display in "The Automotive Image," one of the simplest and most fascinating is Joseph de Cassere's picture of Miss Atlanta, circa 1930. She is perched on the back seat of a Buick convertible, proceeding in a motorcade beneath the faces of a crowd clustered along the sidewalk, on balconies and in windows. You see the crowd as one mass, and the girl in the center as a floral brightness--her right arm lifted in a practiced wave, the sun highlighting her shoulder, her smiling, tulip-like face angled toward the camera. Then your eye locates the profile of the man driving the car, and the slanting shadow that bisects his face seems to infiltrate the meaning and scope of the entire scene: the faces in the crowd appear distinctly conspiratorial; the girl has been debased into a symbol, and is happily oblivious to what that symbol embodies or supports; and even inanimate objects and trivial details--the sheen of the car and the incomplete lettering of a storefront in the background--possess an enlarged, fictive meaning, a circuit of tension and a certain chill suggestive of all that is sinister, ridiculous and mesmerizing about displays of institutionalized eroticism.

It is a sure thing, though, that this particular angle on the scene--the chilled, ironic feeling of mockery and awe--did not exist outside the photograph. Neutral and straightforward as the picture appears at first glance, you could not come by the same perspective even if you were able to stand at that street, at that instant, and witness the actual event. The picture, like much of the work in the exhibit, illustrates the most basic, elusive and inexhaustible fact about photography--that even the most artless photographs are not so much records of reality as they are refinements and extensions of it.

The photographs on view in "The Automotive Image" have cars as their nominal subject. The show features an even balance of color and black-and-white work, and the quality, on the whole, is exceptionally high. The pictures include close-ups of wheels and grilles, views of roadside landscape, several junks and wrecks, a couple of corpses, and one female nude. The photographers, most of them not widely known, have been adroit in capturing the absurdity and the glamor of the automobile, its allure as an emblem of commercialism, transience and sex, but the show's interest as a sociological record is overwhelmed by the force, wit and elegance of individual pictures. The strongest work is the product of sensibilities inclined towards the commonplace, the fragmentary, the unresolved, and the best photographs are frequently of nothing much at all. Duane Powell gets a peculiar, hovering beauty out of a telephone pole, the cresent of a car top, and a nubbly expanse of sand. Bill de Palma's black-and-white picture of a black billboard, a line of trees, two parked cars and a man in an overcoat holding a paper cup, beside a wet-haired kid wearing sunglasses, is a display of visual acuity remarkable for its simplicity, poise and verve.

Other pictures are more emphatically striking: a large color photograph by Paul Souza, shot through a tilting windshield, containing a snaking road, dark cliffs and, above the foreshortened yellow strip of the car's hood, an exultant view of sunstruck clouds--a kind of visual trumpet blast. Essentially the same compositional strategy, and the same dramatic clarity, are on view in a black-and-white photograph of an industrial wasteland by Roswell Angier: in the foreground, framed by a windshield and side-window, we see the blurred silhouette of a rearview mirror, a woman's blanketed back, a squinting Indian girl and a stop sign ornamented with a tinsel Christmas tree. In the background: a chainlike fence, grain silos, and cylinders of gasoline mounted on flatcars--all of this presented with illimitable, understated bitterness and a quality of throwaway grace.

These are only a few examples; the power and surprise of the show lie in the richness of such variety. Taken as a whole, the pictures turn out to be less about cars than about photography, its prodigality as a medium, its capacity to abstract and transform the materials of reality. The show's real subject is the camera's ability to extract from the banality and clutter of common experience a meaning and order unavailable to the casual eye. What come through most sharply in the photographs is an immediacy and potency of detail, an aura of enchanted concreteness radiating from the most ordinary places and things--the raw blue color of gravel, a shallow driveway, the symmetrical vacancies of parking lots, the abject curve in the necks of street lamps.

In organizing such details into pictures, a number of the photographers have exploited their medium's access to ambiguity, the unguided camera's tendency to describe things without explaining them. (The most bedeviling example features a car's empty interior, a glimmer of light edging the trim beneath the window, through which we see a tangle of foliage and a woman whose face is cut off by the car top, and whose braceletted hands are removing her underpants.) And nearly all the pictures display a reluctance (shared by most contemporary painters) to deal directly with, or even to acknowledge, the complexities of a human face--the majority of faces in these photographs are cropped or obscured, or wear blank looks.

What remains most heartening and absorbing about "The Automotive image" is the quality of cheerful, reckless perception on view in the best work, betokening as it does an anarchic embrace of everything that exists--everything that exists and that can be photographed--despite and including the world's meanness, violence, and disorder. Even the most coolly-pictured scenes convey a sharp sense of the photographer's elation in the face of his medium's immense range, its omnivorousness. Consider, as a final example, James Bodo's color photograph showing a "Putt-Putt" miniature car raceway, empty and sheeted in snow. It is difficult to look hard at such a picture without being overtaken by a sudden, intimate, desolating sense of the particular strangeness and beauty of 20th-century civilization, and without realizing simultaneously that this exact, simple configuration of forms--the vista of T-shaped streetlamps, icicles on an orange iron railing, a depthless blue sky--is poignant, unrepeatable, resplendent with mystery.